Absolutely no one wants to hear that their accounts have been hacked. It doesn’t even matter what kind, if there’s money involved.
There are all kinds of safeguards in place to help people recover their funds, but oddly, they don’t always work.
This man enjoyed using his Playstation, but when he failed to set up two-factor authentication, his account was hacked.
I had a PlayStation account and a PS4, but I didn’t have 2FA set up (whoops).
Anywho, one morning I woke up to $500 in charges to the PlayStation Network on my credit card for that account.
He lost $500, but Sony refused to refund the money because he couldn’t prove he didn’t spend the money himself.
I ended up contacting PlayStation Support to explain the situation, and they proceeded to try and gaslight me by saying that I must have legitimately purchased what was a slew of PS3 games (I never owned a PS3), and that I must have shared my password with whoever did the purchasing (turns out the purchase was from Brazil).
After a lot of back and forth with them not budging to just refund and remove the games after I changed my password and enabled 2FA,
I did a charge back via my credit card, which led to my account being suspended. All-in-all I probably had about $200-ish in digital games that I lost access to.
Since his job was in demand, he decided to apply to Sony.
As for a bit of background on me, I’m a software developer in the middle of the US, and 5 years ago the market was ridiculous.
I had plans to go to a conference in California a couple months after all of this and was going to buy my own plane ticket, so I had the idea of applying to a job with Sony in their San Jose tech office so I could get them to fly me out for my conference on their dime.
And get them to pay for his trip out to California.
Long story short there, I heard back from a recruiter, the phone screen went well, and I was flown to my conference via a ticket provided by Sony.
They even took me to lunch and paid for a night at a hotel so I could be in San Jose the day after the event.
It actually worked out kind of nicely as I had a FAANG interview planned for not too long afterwards, so it was a good opportunity to just practice interviewing.
It worked, but get this – they lowballed him with the job offer, too.
They ended up offering me a job (pay was a lot lower than what I was making in Denver, despite it being a San Jose-based role), which I turned down, and I’d say I ended up at a net positive of ~$200.
I imagine Reddit is impressed, though!
This comment says apparently this is a thing.
You’ve gotta take care of yourself!
Apparently you’ve gotta keep your eye on Sony.
Not working there is probably a good call.
Several other commenters had stories.
This took commitment.
The very definition of petty revenge.
If you liked that post, check out this post about a woman who tracked down a contractor who tried to vanish without a trace.